After This

gone. A man whose biggest concern, at this age, should be his golf swing.

Pity’s fool, Monsignor even offered to call the choir director to see if he couldn’t come down and play a tune for the ceremony, but John Keane said his wife had already made arrangements with one of their neighbors, the MacLeods, Presbyterians whose nephew played the piano at Juilliard. She had heard the music coming from their house just yesterday, when the boy was visiting. She’d knocked on the door to ask the name of the tune. One thing led to another-she’d been looking for an opportunity to break the news about Clare to the neighbors-and the boy had agreed to come in from the city to play. If that was all right with the Monsignor.

Monsignor McShane held out his hands. “I don’t think the church will collapse,” he said, “if a Protestant plays.” Or if, for that matter (he thought), a girl six months pregnant walks down the aisle in a white dress to marry a boy with a priest, instead of a shotgun, at his back. “We built her pretty strong, John. With your help, as I recall. I don’t think she’ll fall.”

The only bother was letting the piano player in half an hour early so he could “get a feel” for the instrument. Because he liked to linger over his Sunday supper, usually with 60 Minutes on, the Monsignor asked old Mrs. Arnold to hold his dinner until after the ceremony and told the other two priests to go ahead and eat without him. He watched the first half of the show with only a glass of sherry and some cheese and crackers to tide him over, and then left the rectory at 7:25. It was a lovely night. The sky was that polished blue it sometimes got after a storm, or a long winter. Even the traffic along the boulevard, which had become intolerable of late, seemed subdued by the color. He climbed the steps to one of the side doors, let himself in with the key. Over at the school, there were lights on only in the old section, the cafeteria where the AA meetings were held on Sundays. He turned on the lights above the altar and then in the choir where the piano was. Someone had already put a vase of flowers on the altar, a simple blue vase with only a handful of white roses, and he seemed to recall some connection between white roses and unborn babies-was it the Mothers Club that sold white roses on Mother’s Day to help save the unborn babies, or was it the Fathers Club that sold white roses on Mother’s Day to help save the men who had forgotten a present? It was poppies on Veterans Day in any case-Flanders Fields-and the thought reminded him that it was the Keanes, of course, who had lost a boy in Vietnam.

Trouble piled on trouble, Monsignor thought, as he walked down the center aisle (grateful that this would be a quick and simple ceremony, no messing with candles lit at the end of every pew, as was so much in vogue these days, wax dripping everywhere). It struck him, not for the first time, that his modern church, such a miracle to him just a decade ago, would grow dated in the coming years-an old man’s mistaken enthusiasm for the wrong kind of future. He’d already weathered the fight over the return of the old statues, the confessional screens. They’d be asking for Latin again next.

The piano player was just coming up the steps as Monsignor McShane opened the front doors. He was a young guy, small and dark-haired. A young man’s beard under the fair skin. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase and introduced himself with a Scots Irish name that Monsignor didn’t bother to retain. The two walked up the aisle together. “This is some church,” the kid said, craning his neck to take in the Danish modern stained glass, the circus-tent ceiling. He then mentioned that he occasionally played at another Catholic church, an old-fashioned one, St. Paul’s, near his school. “I went to St. Paul’s,” Monsignor said, “as a boy.” And knew immediately, as if he had never understood it before, what his parishioners were lonesome for, in this monstrosity of his. It was not the future they’d been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could not have one without the other.

He went into the vestry while the boy ran his fingers over the keys. You did not have to be a musician to hear the difference, once he got started, between what this kid could do and what the ordinary Sunday musicians played. Monsignor put on his vestments, prepared the altar, walked down the central aisle again to see that there’d been nothing left behind in the pews this morning, checked that he’d left the front doors unlocked, and then walked back up again, still with twenty minutes to spare. He swallowed a little indigestion, a little impatience, thinking of his dinner. He walked across the altar, touching gaudy, literal Saint Gabriel on the knee, and then stood by the boy. You would have to be a musician to explain the difference, but the priest knew it was there. There were the ordinary pianists who played, no doubt, as they had been taught to play, earnest, obedient, faithful to each note (don’t even mention, Monsignor would have said, those awful folk-mass singers with their guitars), and then there was a kid like this, who played in a trance, eyes closed, transformed, transported, inspired (that was the word)-not the engine for the instrument but a conduit for some music that was already there, that had always been there, in the air, some music, some pattern, sacred, profound, barely apprehensible, inscrutable, really, something just beyond the shell of earth and sky that had always been there and that needed only this boy, a boy like this, to bring it, briefly, briefly, to his untrained ear.

Something he hadn’t even known he’d been straining to hear.

The boy finished the piece and in the fading of the last notes came the voices at the front door of the church, the Keanes and (he had their names on a slip of paper in his pocket) the other parents, the groom, and the young, expectant bride.

“Have you taken a lot of lessons?” the priest asked, before he walked down the aisle to greet them (because it would be an informal wedding, the best kind, really, softly spoken, unrehearsed). “Or have you always known how to play?”

The boy was arranging the pages of his music. He looked over his shoulder at the priest. The lights from the altar cast the shadow of his long lashes across his cheeks. A young man, beautiful in his way. “Both,” he said, politely. “A lot of lessons, but it seems I’ve always known how to play.”

Monsignor nodded. John Keane in his gray suit was coming toward them from one of the side aisles, favoring that bad leg, his son, his other son, just behind him, and then what had to be the bridegroom looking like the oversize boy he was in his first suit, well-scrubbed, determined, afraid. The women in their pale wedding clothes were gathered at the door. “It’s a gift, then,” the priest said.